“I have never seen a website — in the last five years — require you to delete the cache in an effort to resolve errors,” — Leavitt Partners

This problem doesn’t seem to plague eHealthInsurance.com. Why wouldn’t current Web design practices be used. Were officials worried that old folks would try to use the service on old IBM PCs? It isn’t like a Web design firm could save money using the old 1999 website technology (assuming HHS didn’t farm out the design work to a nursing home for retired tech workers).

What the West should do, he says, is stand aside and let poorer countries find their own paths, in fits and starts, at their own pace, to development and prosperity, just as the West had to do a century or so earlier.